Cloudflare Says Ddos Attacks Have Multiplied To 1.7x Last Year's...
If you thought the AI industry deals with big numbers—millions of tokens, giga-zigga-exa-flexa-FLOPs (a very real metric, I tell you)—wait until you hear about the internet. That thing has been taking an absolute beating over the last year. We've seen very visible effects of this with various memorable outages, but now we've also got some numbers to put to it, in the form of "hyper-volumetric" DDoS attacks.
Giant content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare has released some somewhat troubling stats and info regarding the past year of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These are essentially attacks that attempt to flood a target service with packets of data to overload and overwhelm it and prevent it from doing the work it's actually meant to be doing, such as providing an internet connection to customers or displaying webpages.
According to Cloudflare, DDoS attacks are up 170% to 36.2 million in 2025 compared to 2024. To zoom in a little, the company says that in the third quarter of 2025, it "mitigated an average of 3,780 DDoS attacks every hour." That's 63 DDoS attacks each minute, or about one every second.
Not every DDoS attack is a noteworthy one, of course, but there have been a few noteworthy ones over the past few months. In particular, a few were highlighted by Cloudflare over the last couple of months as consecutive record breakers (woo?).
In the weeks leading up to September there was a DDoS attack that attempted to flood its target with 11.5 Tbps of data. Then, in late September, there was one that topped this with an attempt to flood its target with 22.2 Tbps of data, which equated to 10.6 billion packets of data per second. And then there was one in early October that saw a new record 29.6 Tbps flung at its target. These attacks each lasted less than a minute.
Those small timeframes are a real problem if you don't have automated defenses in place: "most attacks, 71% of HTTP DDoS and 89% of network-layer, end in under 10 minutes. That's too fast for any human or on-demand service to react. A short attack may only last a few seconds, but the disruption it causes can be severe, and recovery takes far longer."
We've seen how long it can take for simple mistakes to be cleaned up and service to be restored. Cloudflare's recent outage, for instance, was caused by a double-sized file propagating throughout the network. This likely happened quite quickly, but it took hours for service to be restored to full, normal functionality.
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Source: PC Gamer
